Over the last decade, there has been a substantial increase in the use and deployment of networked client devices. For example, personal computers, tablet computers, and cellular telephones may communicate in accordance with one or more Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards. In some instances, these client devices may operate in one of a distributed set of branch offices.
To ensure a client device is authorized to gain access to network resources, an authentication procedure may be performed. The authentication procedure may involve client devices seeking approval from an external RADIUS server to operate within the network system. This approval may include RADIUS attributes provided by the external RADIUS server over a data connection to a local network controller or switch. These RADIUS attributes may be used to assign roles and VLANs, which define access privileges, to the client devices. Although this approach may provide an efficient, centralized technique for authenticating client devices and assigning roles and VLANs when the external RADIUS server is accessible, authentication may be halted and client devices may not be able to gain access to the network when the external RADIUS server is inaccessible.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.